Featuring Two Lectures:
"Godard's Wars"
Philip Watts, Associate Professor of French, Department Chair, Columbia University
"Thoughts on Giorgio Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive"
Jeffrey Mehlman, Professor of French, Department of Romance Studies, College of Arts and Sciences, Boston University
Godard's Wars
Philip Watts, Associate Professor of French, Department Chair, Columbia University
There has been much controversy about French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard's relation to the Jews and the Holocaust. Godard was recently accused of anti-Semitism. Philip Watts will return to this recent affair by focusing on Godard's filmic representation of WWII, the Middle East conflict and the Holocaust.
Thoughts on Giorgio Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive
Jeffrey Mehlman, Professor of French, Department of Romance Studies, College of Arts and Sciences, Boston University
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has argued in several books that the concentration camp has become the paradigm of our life in modern, liberal democracies. His work has a vast influence on many different fields and disciplines: legal scholarship, social sciences (especially political science), and literary studies in the US, Europe and beyond.
Jeffrey Mehlman will examine the perils engaged and not always avoided when Italy's pre-eminent philosopher, perched between Heidegger and Benjamin, Foucault and Arendt, hurls the pre-eminent discourses of European modernity at the pre-eminent catastrophe of the twentieth century in what never quite coheres as the pre-eminent epistemological encounter of modern times.
Sponsored by Sponsored by: Holocaust & Genocide Studies, Human Rights Program, German, Scandinavian & Dutch, Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature, French & Italian
For more information, please contact the Center for Genocide and Holocaust Studies
* Name: Laura Lechner
* E-mail: lech0045@umn.edu
* Phone: 612-624-0256
